---

name: advanced-pipelines description: "Configure Docling VLM, ASR, enrichment, model-catalog, optional backend, GPU, MLX, remote-model API, and offline model workflows without triggering unsafe downloads by default." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: MIT

Advanced Pipelines

Use this sub-skill when a task needs Docling's heavy or optional pipelines rather than the standard PDF OCR/table path.

Route Here For

• Running the VlmPipeline for full-page PDF conversion with DocTags or Markdown VLM output.
• Selecting VLM presets, inference engines, MLX, Transformers, vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, OpenAI-compatible APIs, or runtime overrides.
• Running the AsrPipeline for audio/video transcription through InputFormat.AUDIO.
• Enabling code, formula, picture classification, picture description, chart, or VLM-backed enrichment stages.
• Choosing model families from the Docling model catalog and planning GPU, CUDA, MPS, MLX, XPU, API, or offline artifact deployments.
• Prefetching or validating model artifacts for air-gapped use, while avoiding conversion-time downloads in preflight checks.

Route Elsewhere

• Basic conversion, DocumentConverter.convert, strings, URLs, streams, or failure handling: use conversion.
• CLI syntax, supported format tables, and shell export recipes: use cli-and-formats.
• Standard PDF OCR engines, table structure options, accelerators, and artifacts_path basics: use pipeline-configuration.
• Remote docling-serve service clients, service URLs, API keys, and service CLI routing: use remote-service-client when available. Remote model APIs embedded inside a local pipeline remain here.
• Markdown, JSON, HTML, DocTags export, serialization, or chunking: use document-outputs.

Safe Defaults

• Do not run VLM, ASR, enrichment, or model-prefetch commands unless the user opted into downloads, expensive inference, and any remote data transfer.
• Use scripts/check_optional_backends.py for read-only environment preflight; it checks imports and binaries but does not instantiate models, download weights, contact model APIs, or convert documents.
• For remote model APIs inside VlmPipeline or picture description, set enable_remote_services=True only after confirming the endpoint and data-sharing policy.
• For ASR, confirm docling[asr] and ffmpeg before converting audio/video.

Core Patterns

from docling.datamodel.base_models import InputFormat
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import VlmConvertOptions, VlmPipelineOptions
from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter, PdfFormatOption
from docling.pipeline.vlm_pipeline import VlmPipeline

vlm_options = VlmConvertOptions.from_preset("granite_docling")
converter = DocumentConverter(
    format_options={
        InputFormat.PDF: PdfFormatOption(
            pipeline_cls=VlmPipeline,
            pipeline_options=VlmPipelineOptions(vlm_options=vlm_options),
        )
    }
)

from docling.datamodel import asr_model_specs
from docling.datamodel.base_models import InputFormat
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import AsrPipelineOptions
from docling.document_converter import AudioFormatOption, DocumentConverter
from docling.pipeline.asr_pipeline import AsrPipeline

pipeline_options = AsrPipelineOptions(asr_options=asr_model_specs.WHISPER_TURBO)
converter = DocumentConverter(
    format_options={
        InputFormat.AUDIO: AudioFormatOption(
            pipeline_cls=AsrPipeline,
            pipeline_options=pipeline_options,
        )
    }
)

References

• references/vlm-asr-ocr.md for VLM conversion, ASR transcription, remote model API, and force-backend decision patterns.
• references/model-overview.md for model-stage selection across VLM convert, picture description, code/formula, layout, table, and ASR.
• references/optional-backends.md for extras, GPUs, MLX, CUDA, API runtimes, model artifacts, and offline planning.
• references/troubleshooting.md for missing extras, model downloads, remote-service gates, GPU/MLX issues, ffmpeg, skip behavior, and expensive runs.
• scripts/check_optional_backends.py for safe installed-environment checks before running advanced pipelines.